So, apparently this homeschooling thing is more about my sanctification as a mother than about the kids learning stuff. Yes they are learning stuff, but it's not always about reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. And I'm learning more than they are.

Easter Crafts!

This past week we skipped traditional school and just did Easter crafts! It was great! I decided to do this because a main reason we chose to homeschool is because we want the girls to be exposed to Jesus more than if they were in public school. (Obviously if Caley was in public kindergarten, we would still teach her about Jesus, but the amount of time we spend with her being homeschooled just increases the opportunities of telling her about Jesus.) I didn't want to be overwhelmed with doing what I'd originally planned for school (with math and writing and reading) and do Easter crafts last week. Oh the freedom!

 Here are some of the crafts we made:

 The sign on the middle cross says "Our King"

And the grand finale was the empty tomb resurrection cake!

 He is risen indeed!

Saturday we went to an egg hunt! And Sunday we went to Qwest Field for Mars Hill's Easter service. It was amazing!! Each child got a coloring book with crayons and the pictures were from the Doctrine series, which tells the basic theology of what we believe. It's a great tool and the girls had a fun time coloring!

Spring Break!

We took a Spring Break this week, but didn't do much differently in our activities except I didn't feel the pressure to do Caley's math and KONOS studies. We did however go to the Children's Museum and help at the new church building planting plants. The kids got totally messy but it was really fun!

We will pick up Monday with a new KONOS unit in Orderliness. We will cover such topics as calendars and seasons, planets, sequencing, and animal, plant, and rock classification and the unit will take us to the end of May when our school year will be over. I can hardly believe we are nearly done with the first year of homeschooling! I have learned so much!

As Wesley gets older and is now walking all over the place, homeschooling is reaching another challenge because Wesley always wants in on the fun. He is very good about taking an afternoon nap, but that is also the girls' quiet time and my rest time so I am hesitant to give up the afternoon nap to doing school work. But if we try to do school work at the table while Wesley is awake, he is quite the hand-full. I am hoping to be able to teach him to do something while we do school, at least during the writing, math and reading time for Caley. He is fine if we are doing projects and can be involved or if the girls are independently working I can keep him busy, but it's not always like that.

I also picked up next year's math book for Caley, we are going to use Saxon Math 1. She has really seemed to enjoy the Math K book and Math 1 is similar so it's worth a shot. I've been able to use my own manipulatives instead of buying the Saxon ones which are very expensive. Instead of unifix cubes we use legos, and instead of counting bears we use little plastic figures. When it calls for number cards I just cut up paper and make my own. With the 1st grade book though it begins to move into worksheets which I'll need to purchase.

Now that we will have a new baby at the end of October/beginning of November, I'm not sure how next year will look. I've contemplated starting early in August, taking a break in November and December (as we did last year with the Christmas rush) and then re-beginning in January. But I feel unsure about starting school when it's still beautiful weather and we'd rather be outside in the sprinkler. Alternately, we could start in September, take a break in November and December, then start again in January and go all the way through June or even into July the next summer. I'm really primarily concerned about Caley's math book, which I'd like to finish. But since we'll probably do things flying solo again, I guess it doesn't really matter when we do what. :)
I'll leave you with a sweet picture of my two girls reading.

Other things we've been doing...

Another new development in our homeschool is Mommy is expecting another baby! Due date is November 4th, so I'm about 6 weeks along. We're all looking forward to welcoming another little one to our family and teaching about human development along the way. Caley is going to be especially helpful, I hope. Keep track of things through the baby ticker on the right.

What We've Been Doing

We are into the next unit on horses and it's been pretty fun. We have been coloring pictures of horses, learning about how to control the horse by using the bridle and the purpose of a saddle, reading books about horses and we even watched "Secretariat" about a racing horse. The girls have really enjoyed it. In the next week or so I'm hoping to visit a horse farm. The weather just hasn't been conducive for such a trip. This week we made stick horses out of Daddy's old socks. We raced them and pretended to ride them to playgroup this week.

For math we are up to about lesson 80 in the Saxon K book, and ahead of schedule to finish on time. I'm so glad! Lately I've been trying to think of more natural ways to teach whatever concept the lesson is addressing, such as by ordering or graphing Caley's toys or suckers instead of some uninteresting thing the lesson suggests. Last week the lesson was on ordering by length left-to-right, longest-to-shortest and I asked her to order my jewelry instead of whatever the lesson said. She really got into it! Another lesson was about ordinal position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) and we were able to work it into dancing to music and making a parade.
I've also been trying to be more intentional about involving the kids in whatever projects I need to get done around the house. They very enthusiastically helped me wash the refrigerator, vacuum the car, sort the toys in the mud room, and Caley just today helped rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I'm thankful to have a lot of time with them that we can work on things like homemaking. In my mind I count it as school, just an additional activity to their academic work.

Caley is also continuing her speech therapy, and still loves going to see Mrs. Rose each week. She loves getting stickers and practicing her words. I have a feeling she'll qualify again next year, as Mrs. Rose said she's doing very well but still not consistently generalizing in her daily speech.

And as always, Amelia is being silly!!